Thursday, March 22, 2007

Days of the Week

It is a time-honored tradition to assign tasks to the days of the week. At times I balk at the imposed organization, and at time I thrive on it. Lately, as we've moved to a more organic learning paradigm, we've found that grounding ourselves in a weekly living rhythm gives us a more natural structure than our old model of planning lessons and fitting in the chores of daily life when we could.

(So why isn't this on the home learning blog? It's one of those posts that could have gone either way, so I decided to put it here.)

I didn't fashion a weekly homekeeping plan out of thin air. Some of these things have been this way for years; for instance, I have no say in when the weekly farmer's market is held. Mostly I observed, and filled things in where they work best for us. You can see that there are large chunks of time that are unaccounted for ~ that's because I refuse to schedule every minute. For instance, Thursday afternoons may find us reading, playing, crafting...whatever it is that we want to do.

Monday is HOME day. Partly this is because we are often out on the weekends and we need some quiet time to regather ourselves. We also have to transition back to having Papa at work for the week. Staying home gives us a big in-breath before our Tuesday play group.

What do we do on Mondays? We do laundry; I don't usually do laundry on the weekends. We tidy the house, which is often needed if it was a "hurricane" weekend. We spend some extra time organizing and putting things away in the boys' room. We usually spend a fair amount of time in food preparation, making bread, granola, grains, etc. for the week.

Tuesday is our ERRANDS and FRIENDS day. We do any errands that require the car, such as dropping off donation items, going to the garden center, thrifting, etc. Most of the time we just thrift before meeting friends for a play date. Tuesday evenings we usually walk to the library.

Wednesday is our GARDEN day. Right now the garden doesn't usually need a lot of work, but we expect that to change in late April after we return from our trip and get serious about our spring/summer garden. Wednesday is usually a home day as well, although we will occasionally go out for a field trip or for the book sale at the thrift store. Wednesday evenings the boys usually have a bike race.

Thursday is our PARK and MARKET day. In the morning we meet with friends and spend a couple of hours at the park. The kids play and I have a chance to chat with my friends and accomplish some handwork. After dinner we walk to the farmer's market.

Friday is one of our most relaxed days, and it doesn't have a title yet. We mostly stay home, but sometimes schedule a play date with just one other family rather than our entire play group. I love to have a relaxing afternoon, either chatting with a friend, reading to the boys, or doing handwork. Friday evenings are MOVIE NIGHT, which is a big deal to children who do not watch TV. We rent a family friendly movie, or the boys choose one from our small DVD library. A couple of times a year we actually walk over to the movie theater and see a movie there.

Our weekends are more organic, which is good and bad. I'd like to add some rhythm to the weekends, keeping Saturdays for chores and visits and leaving Sundays open for family time and time in nature. I often have no control over our weekends, however, because of the constant stream of party invitations and family gatherings that come our way. We're going to work on it.